The title of the memoir, seemingly intriguing yet enigmatic to many, stems from the author’s early fascination with the highways of Nigeria in the early 1960s. Wole Soyinka, on returning to Nigeria from England, as a graduate of Leeds, arrived on the wheels of a Rockefeller Fellowship to research traditional dramatic forms. In his hunt for festivals and performing companies, he traversed the breadth of the country and the West African coast:

“The road and I thus became partners in the quest for an extended self-discovery. Early morning departure was my favourite hour; you caught the road’s exhalation as it rose from the tarmac with the sun’s heated awakening, piercing the early mists in a proprietorial mood…” (p. 50)

The roads and bridges, most of which were inherited from the departing British, “were not only narrow and rickety, some were suspended it seemed between the world of the living and the world of the ancestor.” On them was enacted Soyinka’s spectatorship to crashes, dramatic “scenes of death”, of vehicles and animals, some of which he recasts, as the parallel interpretation of life as a journey, in the pointillist cadence of his poem, Death in the Dawn, collected in Idanre and Other Poems.

As an aside: I often advise the reading of Wole Soyinka’s memoirs before the reading of his plays, novels, and poems. Much of the purported mystery and obscurity in the creative works of this man are compact moulds of the author’s personal response to personal experiences, birthed within a critical collective occasion of history, politics, or culture. In some cases, it even balls down to personal timelines and extremely precise trajectories. Fitfully revealed in You Must Set Forth at Dawn, Soyinka’s incessant act of commentary on just about any feature of or event in his surroundings, whether proximate or approximate, is nearly, if not totally, compulsive. Decaying roads, contracting lands, rough nightclub habitués, delectable belles, dinner parties, sàárà, meddlesome masquerades, rigged elections, civil wars, prison walls, military dictators, dishonest presidents, philandering directors, airport farewells, pilgrimages, bereavement, apartheid, weathers in exile, and the figurines of deities: all have formed the watercourse, the socio-political channel, through which the literary conceptions of Soyinka condense onto pages.